Stop click baiting me (Opinion)

When someone wants to market a product, they hire a company that will try to sell it by any means necessary. This may involve talking about effects it may or may not have, but all the while mentioning it to get the listener or reader’s attention. This may just be to get the product sold — but is it really worth risking a company’s reputation just to sell an item?

A major issue with online videos has to do with how the producer puts misleading titles and/or pictures to draw in more views to make more money. This is a huge risk, but it may pay off for the producer (not the audience) which is a big problem for a website that makes its money from customers watching content. This leads to a huge issue of whether this helps or hurts a channel; from my experience, it hurts the channel quite significantly. This is in part due to the fact that customers looking for credible sources have trouble finding them because these clickbait channels do not fulfill their duties.

Why clickbait? It’s an easy way to get money, and you producers don’t have to have very much skill to utilize it. This also sparks some debate regarding whether it is ethical to exploit viewers for money. This also applies to businesses that don’t care for the community and only seek money. Electronic arts is a prime example. They lied to the player base on multiple fronts and made everything exponentially expensive so it looked like a money grab, which is essentially what it was.

This drops into that last segment which is: what can we do to stop this? This question is impossible to answer because people will continue clicking on aimless videos no matter what happens. It’s because what is on the thumb nail or what is being told is too good to be true. Clickbaiting is harmful to marketing industries, and until both consumers and producers fully realize this, all we can do is stand by and avoid falling into the trap of “clicking.”